A deep dive on Andreessen Horowitz's latest "State of Crypto" report. In short: they want people to keep buying crypto, and are not above publishing blatant falsehoods to convince them to do so.

The report itself is 60 pages long, so this is a long one.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/andreessen-horowitzs-state-of-crypto

#crypto #cryptocurrency #VentureCapital #AndreessenHorowitz

Narrative over numbers: Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto report

Venture capital firm and crypto pusher Andreessen Horowitz wants you to keep buying crypto, and is not above publishing blatant falsehoods to convince you to do so.

Molly White

If you found this critical analysis of their report valuable, consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription. My writing is never paywalled, and your support goes long way towards helping me continue doing this kind of work.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/pay-what-you-want

Pay what you want

All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choose to pay for a subscription or not. That said, paid subscribers are crucial to allowing me to continue doing this kind of research and writing, and so if you are able to support my work I would be immensely grateful. You will also get access to additional features including commenting.

Molly White
I start by noting that this "creativity" with the numbers is not new to this year's report. However, because the price downturn was still somewhat recent in last year's, they were able to get away with some subtle manipulations that would be a lot more obvious this year.

The worst slide in the deck is the one that claims Ethereum now uses 94,000x less electricity than YouTube, a comparison they pick to avoid impugning Bitcoin.

However, this data is based on some incredibly shabby math and bad sourcing by a low-quality popsci blog.

It is accurate that the Ethereum merge massively reduced the egregious energy costs of the Ethereum blockchain. But a16z has resorted to outright lies to try to shift the conversation towards electricity costs of services like YouTube, rather than that of Bitcoin and other PoW.
Other portions of the report seem to rely on hoping that people will read the big text rather than the smaller text, or the charts themselves.
@molly0xfff Just want to stop a minute to let you know how much I appreciate this. You're doing great work!